MarkMaunder dot com

A nuclear Google may be a very good thing

Update: April fools courtesy of Arrington and I got taken in bigtime. Ugh! Leaving the original post up as an ode to my naivete. 52 years ago in August 1958 the United States was so confident in our ability to provide clean nuclear energy that we put one hundred and sixteen men in a tin […]

March 31, 2010 | Tech News | No comments

Facebook.com overtakes Google.com as most visited USA domain.

In a press release from HitWise published on CNN Money a few minutes ago, Facebook.com just overtook Google.com as the most visited domain in the USA. This is possibly the most significant milestone in Facebook’s history as a large company. Here’s why: Most of Google’s revenue comes from their Ad business. Half of it comes […]

March 16, 2010 | Business | 2 comments

How to limit website visitor bandwidth by country

This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks. If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if […]

March 4, 2010 | Scaling, Technology | 1 comment

Great piece of writing from Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is running an article about the US pig farming industry. The opening paragraph is a beauty! Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of […]

March 3, 2010 | Writing | No comments

Does your startup pass The Sleep Test

Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I’ll call it The Sleep Test. Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale. If you’re an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling your own time, […]

March 1, 2010 | Startups | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.